On arrows and crosses

Today us students presented the reading material in the First Language Acquisition class, instead of the teacher. She thought it would be good practice, i suppose, and a nice way of gauging our understanding without too much pressure (!). Anyway, it was fun, particularly because we didn't get to the article i was supposed to talk about. Har-har.

Some of the experiments dealt with how infants of each gender reacted upon being exposed to different sets of auditory stimuli. This bit was presented by my classmate Ksenia. She did a good job of it, but i want to write about a detail of her presentation that has nothing to do with linguistics.

You see, when she was drawing a graph to summarize the experiment, she represented the sexes with the traditional circle-and-cross symbol for girls, and circle-and-arrow symbol for boys... Except that, whereas i'd always seen the arrow placed on top of the circle, pointing up and kinda cocked (oops!) to the left, she placed it precisely underneath, centered and pointing down. I´d never stopped to really think about these little drawings, and so my mind just wandered away from the class, now. Luckily i'd already read the article...

OK, so i started pondering, kinda disconnectedly:

The "+" under the circle represents the vagina, and the arrow on top of it is the penis, right? Direct indeed, but one possible representation of sexual organs. Plus, don't tell me you hadn't thought of this, 'cause your mama may believe you, but i won't.

But why a "+"? Am definitely not an expert in this, but i think a vagina does not look like that. "|" might be a more accurate representation, or even "|" with a dot on top. As for the penis, the arrow is, albeit marginally, a more ideographically accurate depiction of it, whatever direction it may be pointing. Gotta get back to this issue of direction, though...

Next question: if the arrow and the cross represent the sexual organs, what do the circles stand for? Maybe the body, the torso... In that case, the cross is placed more or less accurately for women, but the arrow on top of the circle suggests that penises cap the necks of men, and that their heads are always cocked (oops again) to the left. Such an image tends to reinforce folk knowledge of the type "Men think with their dicks". Could the symbol be reflecting this kind of idea? If that's the case, the word "dickhead" would stop being an insult and become a simple statement when applied to any carrier of the y-chromosome.

However, if what the circle represents is the crotch, the arrow can indeed be placed on top of the circle. Nevertheless, the fact that this is so consistently the case may signal both an intention to mislead or great insecurity -- in the creators of the symbol, at least. That Ksenia drew the arrow pointing down is equally accurate, as anyone who knows a penis can assert. A possible compromise might be to draw a symbol with arrows pointing simultaneously up and down, but this might also confuse, as anyone who knows elementary biology can also assert.

As for femaleness, if we assign the value of "crotch" to the circle, the "+" or the "|" should be within it, since the vagina does not project from the crotch in any way, but is, indeed, within it. This new symbol would probably be much more liable to criticism (imagine :"A cross within a circle??? What do women think they are, the centre of the world???") but personally, i think it should be adopted anyway. Increased anti-establishment criticism directed towards women would mean there has been an equalization of genders within mainstream society.

So, next, one should look at the symbols of the cross and the arrow by themselves, away from their relationship to the circle.

That "x" marks the (G) spot is no mystery. What might you find underneath it? A treasure, perhaps? The place in the map where you want to get to, definitely. All kinds of symbolic thinking sprout from those too little intersecting lines.

As for the arrow... Well, we all know that men are warlike and violent, so giving them a penis that can also function as a weapon can only make them happy, right? Plus, you know, an arrow pierces, shoots... Crude, but fitting, particularly since in certain cultural environments such weapon-related terms are often used to refer to the penis or its functions (am back in linguistics arena! yay!).

Let's turn to history a little now. We know that these two symbols were used in antiquity (and still are, in astronomy) to mean Venus and Mars, and that the planets themselves were associated with greco-roman gods. That Venus, a goddess whose main attribute was the dispensation of love and beauty, is even today so closely associated with womanhood, really gives one pause. The same goes for Mars -god of war- and men.

I read somewhere that we people do all of our thinking in terms of symbols. We tie them and connect them in all sorts of ways and at different levels, and most of the time we don't even stop to look what we've done, so who knows the kind of tangles we end up with! Perhaps this is why noticing a little change in one symbol can induce us to retrace all its connection, and for once we really start thinking about what we really think...

This sounds like something that could be used in teaching, too: familiarize people with sets of situations or reasoning patterns, and then change little things, one at a time. Good way to induce questioning, to give people time to understand complexity, to build it themselves step by step, and own it... But wait, am not a teacher anymore. At least for now. So, stop! Although one may wonder what kind of student i am, if the mind wanders so in the middle of a class...

The regular type of student, i suppose.

Well, there must be bunches of books about all this sexual symbolism stuff, some of it probably quite interesting... I don´t think i'll look anything up, though. Got too many other readings assigned, so this bit of mental farting will have to suffice for now.